Landslide

Memories of a campaign that fired up a budding journalist

By Bill Fields

The 1972 election is remembered mostly as a snoozefest because of the landslide victory by incumbent President Richard Nixon over George McGovern, but it woke up an eighth-grader to politics.

I had paid only sporadic attention earlier. I remember the sadness when my mother told me at the breakfast table that Robert F. Kennedy had died after being shot during the 1968 campaign, when we later had a mock election in fourth grade. I recall having a Bob Scott For Governor button and seeing a rare Eugene McCarthy bumper sticker on a car in Southern Pines, where my parents voted at the firehouse precinct on East New Hampshire. That same year, of course, with the Vietnam War and civil rights on the front burner, Jesse Helms was in peak form delivering his conservative editorials at the conclusion of the WRAL Channel 5 television news broadcast, spewed nightly since the year after my birth.

Four years later, as my interests broadened from the sports section to include the real world, I devoured what political news I could get. That meant the Greensboro Daily News that arrived in our yard each morning and forays to the town library to look at The New York Times. One of the Times’ political columnists, Tom Wicker, I would learn later, was born and raised in Hamlet and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Some Sundays, I settled down in front of Lawrence Spivak on “Meet the Press” and more closely watched the “CBS Evening News” with Walter Cronkite. Scanning the AM dial on winter evenings looking for basketball games from faraway cities, I paused for reports from primaries in New Hampshire or Iowa.

What really fired up my political passion was the presence downtown of the local Democratic and Republican party offices, each of which rented space on or near Broad Street. Although my views had already begun to lean far away from Helms — if he was Manteo, I was Murphy — I was an equal opportunity collector, taking any button or bumper sticker the volunteers for either side would let me have.

Making return visits, I rounded up what I could until realizing that the people manning the offices weren’t too keen on someone who wouldn’t be old enough to vote for a couple of elections hoarding their stuff. The folks were generous enough, though, that I created my own campaign corner in my bedroom, the buttons with their sharp pins and stickers with their pungent smell taking over my bulletin board, new teams to follow in a larger league.

Election Day, Nov. 7, 1972, was quite a day for the GOP. Nixon routed McGovern, winning everywhere except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Helms, parlaying the recognition and support from his decade-plus on TV, defeated Democrat Nick Galifianakis for a United States Senate seat in North Carolina. With Scott unable to run because of term limits, Republican James Holshouser beat Hargrove “Skipper” Bowles for N.C. governor.

My immediate impressions of Nixon’s lopsided victory came from the Greensboro paper and the network news shows. “Nixon Wins Re-Election In Landslide,” the large, eight-column headline on the front page blared on Nov. 8. Wicker, acknowledging the rout and trying to look on the bright side, wrote in his Times “In the Nation” column on Nov. 9: “Those of us who have most seriously questioned Mr. Nixon in his first term and in his re-election campaign are all but compelled by the size of his victory to assume the best from him now.”

Like lots of aspiring journalists, before too long I would immerse myself in two books about the campaign: The Boys on the Bus, by Timothy Crouse, and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, by Hunter S. Thompson. Although Crouse’s book in particular skewered the rise of pack journalism, those were glory days for print journalism, and newspaper ink was an intoxicating thing.

During college at Carolina, several of us in an advanced reporting class got to huddle with Wicker over a few Heinekens at Harrison’s bar on a Friday afternoon. It was a fascinating couple of hours with a legend generous with his time and his stories, an opportunity that a boy far from a press bus couldn’t have imagined.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north 30 years ago but hasn’t lost his accent.

Memories on Wheels

Sometimes there’s nothing basic about transportation

By Bill Fields

I never paid too much attention to four-leaf clovers or cracks in the sidewalk, but once, playing Kreskin’s ESP at a neighbor’s house in 1969, the “mystery pendulum” made a prediction the famous mentalist would have been proud of.

Many years later I’m not sure what I really think about “extra sensitive perception,” as Barney Fife called it. That particular Sunday afternoon, though, gave me a reason to believe.

With a notable exception of stranding us in Tabor City when it broke down returning from the beach one time, our well-traveled Plymouth station wagon — which took my parents to their jobs and my sisters to college — remained reliable transportation. There had been no talk around our kitchen table about getting a new car, no inkling of the possibility. When the board game said otherwise, it seemed as outlandish as forecasting I would be one of the tallest, fastest boys in fifth grade.

In less than two weeks, I was getting into a ’69 Ford Fairlane 500 with my dad as he drove it off the lot at Jackson Motors in Pinedene. At that point, if Kreskin had said Brooks Robinson was going to come to town and spend a week teaching me how to play third base, I would have believed him.

It was a beautiful automatic transmission (Cruise-O-Matic) automobile, a four-door sedan the lightest of blue, the color of the Tar Heels before television demanded a bit darker hue so the uniform numbers would stand out. It had comfortable and roomy bench seats. It had a large trunk. It had seat belts!

The Fairlane carried us to Florida for the first time, and on the way back stopped at Six Flags Over Georgia. It idled in heavy traffic in Atlanta and pulled over for a scenic vista on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

At different times, the Fairlane smelled like Salems, chili dogs, Brut 33, a stringer full of farm-pond bream, Juicy Fruit and the sweat of 36 holes on a July day.

I got my driver’s license in that car in 1975. I picked my mother up at her bank job, in the winter, when the sun set early, tuning in WABC New York while I waited for her in a parking space on Broad Street. I drove it to junior golf tournaments in Henderson and Myrtle Beach, to my senior prom via the JFR Barn, when gas was 69 cents a gallon.

Mom and Dad loaded me and my belongings in August of 1977 and took me to college in Chapel Hill, to my room in Old West. Less than three years later, I was behind the wheel driving south toward home with my tears and my sport coat for Dad’s end game with cancer.

The Fairlane went to Stoneybrook, Carolina Cougars’ games, a Supertramp concert, the GGO, North Carolina Motor Speedway and to Atlantic Beach in the wee hours, when that seemed like the perfect call one spring night senior year in college.

I never got a ticket in the Fairlane, but once, exiting Pinecrest High School in a long line of cars, I had to be at my most persuasive to convince a highway patrolman I was not the idiot tossing firecrackers out the window.

In the summer of 1981, after graduating from Carolina and setting out into the real world, it seemed like the time was right to move on from the Fairlane that had served so well. It was a dozen years old and had about 115,000 miles on it. There were nicks on the back bumper from changing into golf spikes in parking lots. The paint was corroded at the driver-side window, so often did my father rest his arm there.

From the same lot that had been home to the Fairlane before our very unexpected purchase, in what had become Bill Smith Ford, I bought a white Escort that would be mine for a decade. After spritzing the Fairlane and vacuuming the interior at the self-serve car wash, I drove it to the house of man near West End who had answered my classified.

I got $300 from the sale but still felt kind of empty getting rid of a car that had grown old as I grew up.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north 30 years ago but hasn’t lost his accent.

All Dressed Up

A boy, a dinner jacket and a new chapter in life

By Bill Fields

Late in the afternoon on Saturday, Sept. 3, 1966, I had a small part in a wonderful event. A very small part.

I was, like the mums, gladioli and snapdragons in the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church, a decorative touch.

When you’re getting married and have a 7-year-old brother — as was the case with my sister Dianne — you make him a junior usher, a role as vital as being a lifeguard in a parking lot. The groom, Bob, had a much younger sibling (named Bill, too), who also was enlisted for this non-essential duty. So the two of us, in dinner jackets like the rest of the males in the wedding party, gave no one a program and helped no one to his seat.

It was the best standing-around I’ve ever done.

The occasion had been a couple of years in the making, since Dianne and Bob met while students at Wake Forest College. She was a Spanish major, and he was studying biochemistry, which would underpin his esteemed career as a scientist-professor. They are both smart as a whip, with kind hearts, his patience balancing her energy.

It is difficult for me to remember Dianne without Bob because I was so young when they began dating. During their courtship, when Bob came to visit in Southern Pines, I’m sure I occasionally was 4 feet and 60 pounds of pain-in-the-neck when I sneaked up with a water pistol or begged them to come outside and shoot baskets. Any ambivalence about Bob becoming part of the family ended when he gave me my first Matchbox car, a red Ferrari, that made the cheap, tiny metal cars I bought at Pope’s dime store look like true clunkers.

The details from the Summer of the Wedding are hazy, but I remember lots of activity and conversation. The cake was made by Mrs. Bristow, whose house was out on the May Street extension north of town. I knew about “taffy” but wondered what was this “taffeta” that the dresses for the maid of honor (my other sister, Sadie) and the bridesmaids were made of. They were basically Carolina Blue, so whatever the material, that made me happy.

When the big weekend arrived, our house was full of cousins and anticipation. Months earlier the Fields clan had met the Broyles clan in Winston-Salem, a summit of familiarization and approval. The groom’s parents, who lived in West Virginia, put on the rehearsal dinner the eve of the wedding in a private room at Howard Johnson’s in Aberdeen, where the opportunity to have a hamburger and fries chased with an orange Fanta was about all for which a second-grader could hope.

My sister has recalled a sweet moment when she and my father were about to walk down the aisle, toward the altar and a new chapter in her life, and given the flood of emotions wondered if they both could make it. Arm in arm, they did, of course. It was a beautiful ceremony in that small, simple structure on the corner of New York and Ashe that sadly was torn down years ago when the church moved into a larger facility. The vows were followed by cake and punch in the basement fellowship hall that was the junior ushers’ favorite part of the day, followed closely by the throwing of the rice.

Dianne and Bob honeymooned at Fontana Village in western North Carolina. I have a remnant of their trip within arm’s reach on my desk as I type this — the painted stone head of a souvenir tomahawk they brought back for me. They also gifted me a Fontana Dam T-shirt with a cartoon of a bear on the front. I’m wearing it in one of our family’s favorite pictures, all of us posing on a couch suppressing a mighty group giggle.

No marriage is all laughs, but Dianne and Bob have had lots of them in five decades together, a union that has produced two children and two grandchildren, a union that is an example of living well.

It was an honor to be there at the starting line.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north 30 years ago but hasn’t lost his accent.

Beating the Heat

The endless battle with the Dog Days

By Bill Fields

We had a long list of defenses against the heat in the years before air conditioning — things to drink, eat or do — but moving into the last leg of an oppressive Sandhills summer they worked about as well as a fly swatter on a swarm of yellowjackets.

No matter how cold the Kool-Aid or TruAde, how juicy the watermelon or how still you could sit in the shade with a damp washcloth on the back of your neck, as the hot months continued there was a cumulative toll on the counter-measures.

Statistically, July has always been hotter than August by a little bit in Southern Pines, although the highest recorded temperature in North Carolina is 110 degrees, in Fayetteville, on August 21, 1983. By then, of course, central air wasn’t as foreign as Central America.

Growing up, given the swelter that usually had been endured since school let out, by the end of the Dog Days in early August it didn’t matter if the high was 88 instead of 91. It was still humid. Even the prettiest girls weren’t glowing, they were sweating. When he wasn’t working, Dad lived in his Bermuda shorts and white T-shirt, even if the latter didn’t have a pocket for his cigarettes.

There were the lakes (Aberdeen, Badin, White), but those were for special occasions and there could be complications. A kind but directionally challenged neighbor once allowed me to slip into the back seat with his kids for a trip to White Lake, but after several hours and what turned out to be very wrong turns in his Delta 88, we were amid the bars and pawn shops of Spring Lake nowhere close to the clear waters we were shooting for.

We eventually made it to White Lake that day for a brief swim, the whole adventure in sharp contrast to our usual water sport of running under a sprinkler in the yard, activity that was guaranteed to end with taking sand spurs out of your feet. Before my parents splurged and bought a small, aluminum-sided pool that looked like a large yellow can, my friends and I improvised. We dug a large pit and lined it with a spare plastic tarp, believing it would hold water and provide us with a private swimming hole. Fortunately, none of us later tried to become engineers.

I knew two window fans very well. One was old when I was young, its blades within a wooden housing with yardstick-like metal bars on the front, a few of which had gone missing in its lifetime. The other was more modern, a three-speeder whose high setting sounded like it could get a small plane aloft. Compared to the industrial-strength models you saw at the service station or feed store that were mounted on a tall stand and oscillated like the head of an attentive prison guard, ours were meager fans. But late at night, without a shirt or a top sheet, you’d talk yourself into believing they were doing some good.

Being in an air-conditioned space felt like a holiday. The best part of a night in a motel room on a rare summer road trip wasn’t the color television, the sani-wrapped glasses or even an honest-to-goodness pool, but an air conditioner you could crank up as much as you wanted. The food at Hoskins, our favorite place to eat on vacations to Ocean Drive, was matched by the restaurant’s chilled air that took the edge off a sunburn and made you feel, for an hour or so, that you were living large.

I remember when air conditioning came to our home in the form of a large window unit from Sears in the summer of 1974. Placed in a window on the east side of the house in the living room, it was powerful enough to cool the downstairs, although I was cautioned to keep it on low, lest the electric bill soar.

On the evening of August 8, 1974, when Richard Nixon, under so much heat, said he was resigning the presidency the next day, we watched on TV in the newly purchased cool. Summer, like a lot of things, was different.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north thirty years ago but hasn’t lost his accent or his ability to stay cool.